Food Photographer. Recipe cards & Cook Books. Speyside Specialities.

Food Photographer, Food Photography – Speyside Specialities.

Speyside Specialities is a hugely successful business working with Asda, Tesco and many more high street retailers supplying them with polonies, black pudding and haggis products. Like many food manufactures that we work with, they would like to excite the minds of their customers into buying more product. And what better way to do that, than showing the customer the different ways they can consume it through recipe cards. A hugely successful arm to our studio business, it brings together all three disciples of the studio – photography, styling and design. Yes, we did say design – that is a quietly kept secret in the business but as we have over 30 years of marketing and design experience, so we sort of can’t help offering it!

The way it works is really simple when it comes to the recipe card production and cookbooks for that matter. We do all the work for the client, all they do is choose the recipes involved – we provide them normally with around 20 and they select 6 from this group. We then create the styling approach – sourcing anything we need, cook the dish, photograph the dish and then drop them into simple designs – most of out clients are preferring a magazine look to recipe cards so to speak. And we do this in about 14 days from start to finish, so its nice and quick and clients can then react to different market trends.

For this shoot with Speyside Specialities, the starting point was a little different as the client had recipes online and available to their clients already. We were asked how to improve them. So rather than simply just reshoot them – we restructured the recipes themselves. This done we then moved through the usual workflow to create the dishes. How has this created different results? Well they do not have deep fried haggis with mayo as a recipe any more. They have Chinese lion balls served with a dipping sauce. The elements of the recipe are similar only the ingredients have changed and we introduced a recipe workflow by country… Chinese, Italian, Mexican etc.